Sometimes it takes an outside look to make sense of things. For example, at the beginning of this year, a simple conversation with a friend completely outside of the enterprise space cleared up some things about business collaboration.

In short: if we think of collaboration as a way to elevate people and what it is they’re good at as opposed to some kind of super Swiss Army Knife approach to productivity, then suddenly it’s not just about getting things done, it’s about getting things done better.

Post the whole Facebook-for-the-Enterprise hype, businesses are looking for tools that plain and simply allow a team of people, regardless of location or organization, to collaborate efficiently around a single task.

Enter the power of social task management. These tools still support the styles of communication we’ve come to know and love in our personal lives, but they also guide teams of the appropriate size to bring tasks to execution.

When we think about leaders, their behavior and how that behavior influences the world around them is oftentimes on the forefront. And it is for this reason that, when it comes to business, executive presence in both the internal and external social realm is increasingly critical to socially-enabled enterprise success.

While it may seem counter intuitive, sometimes collaborating with others can actually slow a project down and make you and your team less productive. But when does it make sense to pull the plug? How do you know if it’s going to work?

There’s been a lot of digital buzz about some recent connected workspace-y findings from McKinsey Global Institute, which essentially estimate how much potential we’ve failed to unlock with social technologies (spoiler: it’s a lot). Whether or not you find these exact figures to be believable, it’s clear that whatever social business success we’re seeing today is only the tip of the iceberg. Isn’t that exciting?